Diya
Dane, a driver in N’Djamena, Chad, lives peacefully with his wife as they await the birth of their child, immersed in a daily routine that seems protected by a stable equilibrium. Everything shatters in an instant: a phone call answered without thinking, a diverted glance, a child running playfully into the road. The impact is immediate, irreversible. First the hospital, then the child’s death, which triggers the family’s demand for the diya—a burden far beyond Dane’s financial means. In a desperate attempt to find a solution, Dane pushes northward, crossing the endless desert, and in that barren expanse he will eventually stumble upon the truth hidden behind the accident that destroyed his life.
In the Chadian context, the diya represents an ancient form of communal compensation: when a life is taken, the family of the perpetrator must provide material reparation to the victim’s family—not as a mere payment, but as a collective gesture meant to mend the tear caused by death. It is a system interwoven with custom, responsibility, and memory, and one that continues to regulate many conflicts where state justice fails to reach.
The essence of man is contained only in the community, in the unity of man with man.
— Ludwig Feuerbach
— Ludwig Feuerbach
In Diya, Achille Ronaimou inscribes himself into the fabric of contemporary Chad like someone trying to feel the pulse of a body unsure whether it is still alive or merely imitating the memory of its own culture. The ancient mechanism of diya—the communal indemnity meant to restore social order when a life is lost—stands at the center of the film’s thematic inquiry. The film operates in a precarious territory, where tradition fractures and the community reveals its wounds like a landscape that has lost its roots.
The world depicted in Diya is arid, devoid of redemption, poisoned by a time that has accelerated without mercy. Villages that at moments remember, help, and show solidarity, yet more often seem to forget themselves while speaking of “tradition”; local authorities who wear culture like a ceremonial cloak to conceal arbitrary power; families who resort to diya no longer as a gesture of peace but as a mechanism of economic survival. The film observes all of this without emphasis, through a bare lens that seems to excavate dust rather than psychologies.
Ronaimou constructs a visual and narrative language that forces us to witness how a community folds back onto partially hollowed codes, degraded by contemporary uncertainty. Instead of reconciling, the diya generates new forms of pressure. Those who should be protected are often compelled to sell their dignity; those who should demand justice end up negotiating their own wound. And in between stands the youth: suspended, disoriented, heirs to an order they no longer recognize—including religion—and to a future with the consistency of a mirage.
The film advances like a chronicle of the inevitable, and precisely for this reason its ending unsettles. Ronaimou diverges from the moral trajectory he seemed to trace, choosing a surprising, unpredictable conclusion that reopens everything we assumed to be certain. Not to shock, but to underscore that Chadian reality—like many realities today—has transformed to the point of rendering even its roots unrecognizable. Roots that, instead of nourishing the community, have been surrendered to the slow erosion of corruption, need, and a contemporaneity that absorbs and consumes everything.
Ronaimou does not portray Chad as an exotic backdrop; he renders it as a tension. The diya, once a ritual of reparation—a collective gesture meant to transform grief into responsibility—becomes in the film a hollowed structure, manipulated and corroded by the interests of those who have learned to treat even mourning as a space of negotiation. The culture of repair is transfigured into a moral economy, where the value of a life fluctuates with the same instability as the markets that have gradually infiltrated every relationship.
Diya emerges as an implacable act of observation, a reminder of what remains when a culture survives only as an echo, and when justice becomes a commodity in the hands of a time that has traded rituals for transactions.
When the chief bargains with the truth, the child learns the price of the lie.
(Chadian proverb)
(Chadian proverb)
This movie was in the official competition of Torino Film Fest 2025